Why The Salesforce Platform Matters for Nonprofits

After the May 29th Innovation +SocialGood Event in Washington, DC, Keith Heller of Heller Consulting sat down and interviewed Nick Ward of roundCorner. They discussed many topics over the course of their hour+ long interview. Our first post was focused on the introduction of Salesforce1 for Nonprofit organizations since it had just been announced at the event. Today we get into the second part of Keith’s interview to talk about why the Salesforce platform matters to nonprofit organizations.

After the original posting, roundCorner announced their partnership with Salesforce.com and the release of the renamed product NGO Connect. Find out more here.

When asked why nonprofits should care about Salesforce, Nick outlined these 3 core ingredients as the reason roundCorner has been working with Salesforce since 2003:

Multi-Tenant Structure

The Salesforce platform is engineered as a multi-tenant structure that both separates and protects each client’s data while managing each client’s application in ways that assure all clients are on the most current version of the underlying technology platform; it’s a structure that allows individual organizations to have confidence that their data is managed and stored securely and accessibly regardless of where they are.

Application Development

The platform is also an application development platform that provides tools and standards for creating an astonishingly wide array of applications that plug natively into Salesforce’s open and robust API.

Technology

Finally, the platform also allows access to a coherent group of utilities and technologies that are completely focused on constituent management through core objects that form what they call the Sales, Service, and Marketing Clouds. If an application provider chooses to build, as we do, using those clouds, they gain access to best in class workflows and practices learned from world-class commercial business processes.

Monika joined Heller Consulting after spending 8 years in the Boulder technology startup scene. She is an expert in Social and Digital marketing, adopting and implementing new (and old) platforms for organizations ranging from ecommerce, SaaS, and nonprofits. Monika not only understands how these platforms work but how to use them to meet business objectives. When she is not educating and sharing her online talents, she can be found enjoying the music scene in Denver.

One comment

“Platform” is the key work. Salesforce is not just a CRM. In fact, for nonprofits, it’s really just the platform to which CRM features and functions are added/built. I like it because it provides flexibility and expandability.